


so was their sanctuary violated

by aurilly



Category: Penny Dreadful (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Fake/Pretend Relationship, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-23
Updated: 2016-06-23
Packaged: 2018-07-15 08:07:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,642
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7214407
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aurilly/pseuds/aurilly
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A family tragedy forces Victor to seek out a friend.</p>
            </blockquote>





	so was their sanctuary violated

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Emerla](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Emerla/gifts).



Houses this large were invariably plagued by drafts. Instead of stopping them up, Vanessa spent her first day alone seeking them out, picking out the whispers of wind from the other creaks and groans of old wood. Each time she discovered one, she knelt down or went on tiptoe to press her face against the source, relishing the way the intrusion caressed her face. It was a game she had long ago played with Mina, and which she revived today in a solitary form. It served as a reassuring reminder that not all intrusions were malevolent.

Houses this large were not meant to be lonely. Those who could afford to inhabit them kept a staff. A staff of which Sembene had comprised the entirety had branded Sir Malcolm as something of an eccentric in the public view. But now even Sembene was gone, as was everyone else, in ways that felt just as permanent, even if perhaps they were not. The danger of the moment had passed, and they had all gone back to their own troubles. After so much time and blood spent in devotion to hers, Vanessa could not begrudge them.

In the evening, she rooted through the icebox for desserts. The very last of Sembene’s lovingly frosted cakes. She sat at the kitchen table, wearing nothing but her nightdress, and ate the remainder of the chocolate raspberry cake directly off the pastry knife. There was a glorious sort of freedom in this kind of solitude. A freedom from the veneer of respectability she every so often had to put on, like a corset that had once been made for her, but which now suffocated. When she had finished, she licked the knife clean and threw it into the sink, unwashed.

She was not a woman to quail at mice.

* * *

The Cut-Wife had taught her cookery, of a limited type, but Vanessa was at a loss for what to do with the contents of the boxes that continued to be delivered to the house every morning. These were meant for lordlier meals than her repertoire. 

She broke off hunks of bread and dipped them in honey. She had not enjoyed such meals since she had been a child with Mina and Peter, on evenings when all the grown-ups had been away at a dinner, and the servants eager to spoil them.

* * *

On the fifth morning, and falling into a silent gloom, Vanessa heard a knock on the impenetrable—except all too penetrable, it had turned out—brass door. A normal knock by a normal human, she thought with a grim little smile. 

Then she looked out the window to see who it was.

Perhaps not so normal. But perfectly welcome. 

Vanessa descended the stairs quickly but methodically, and opened the door herself. There was no one else to do so.

“Doctor,” she said, ushering him inside. “Much longer, and I would have sought you out myself.” The statement was not entirely true, but neither was it a lie. She hadn’t meant to call on him, hadn’t thought of it, but once the polite words were out, she knew that she meant them, or at least the spirit underlying them.

He turned towards her, and even with his face downturned, she could see the veins in his eyes and the greyness of his skin. He always looked awful—drawn and haggard and marked by dark circles—but today he looked like a different sort of creature entirely. Something not so different from the boy they had captured from the zoo. Then there was the worrying way he kept scratching his arm, worrying if only because it drew Vanessa’s attention to her own scratching. She wondered for how long she had been doing it. 

“Come,” she said, leading him to the library. “Come and sit. What happened?”

“I received a letter this morning,” he said as he sank into the sofa she had covered with drapes the day before, but that could not be all. The symptoms he exuded predated the morning, and suggested a cause more drastic than some annoying correspondence. “It contained rather shocking news. Of a very different type from that with which we usually deal.” 

“And the contents of this letter?” she asked after a moment’s pause, during which he failed to elucidate further.

“My elder brothers were in a carriage accident yesterday,” he said, as coldly and matter-of-factly as if he had been reporting the likelihood of rain. “On their way home from a dinner party in Bath. Startled horse, broken wheel, jagged bluffs. The usual details. The impact snapped their necks.”

“I…” Vanessa swallowed, twice. She hadn’t even known him to have brothers. They were friends, close in ways men and women almost never were, but she knew very little about him at all, she realized. She reached for his hand and cradled it in hers. “I am so sorry.”

It was the correct thing to say, but perhaps not for him. 

“We had not spoken in years. And yet… I find myself in a difficult position. This is why I came.”

“It is tragic, indeed.”

“Yes, yes,” he said impatiently. “But more than that, it is embarrassing. You see—” He gulped. “—In addition to other difficulties, I now find myself in possession of a large fortune, an estate in the country, and a baronetcy.” 

He said it in the tone of a man announcing that he has the gout.

Vanessa repressed a chuckle; mirth had no place in such a conversation. “While the circumstances are horrible, there are not many who would call such a result a ‘difficult position’, my dear doctor.”

He cradled his face in his hands. “I was the youngest, you see, the fourth. The unnecessary extra. It would have been better had I been a girl, to be married gloriously off. I resented this as a child, until I realized that being meant for nothing meant that I was free to achieve anything. And now…”

“And now you must cloak yourself in all that you have tried, rather poorly, to shake off all this time. Whatever heights of scientific research you may have climbed, in this regard you were never as successful as you imagined yourself.”

“What do you mean?”

“Certain manners are impossible to unlearn. The arrogance natural to sons of great families. The correct way of taking a woman’s hand as she exits a carriage. The art of tying an ascot knot. The steps and rhythms of the waltz. Such proficiency does not come accidentally. It is practiced and trained, beaten by masters into ankles that bleed at the end of each session.” 

“I had no master,” he mumbled, gazing through his fingers at the floor. “My mother taught me. She bandaged our ankles beforehand so that they would not bleed.”

“If only everyone else’s masters were so thoughtful.”

He reached out to squeeze her hand, seemed to realize what he was doing, and pulled away. It was then that she understood that he had come for a more concrete purpose than this. Of course he had; she could not understand how she had imagined, even for a second, that sentiment alone had brought him to her pseudo-impenetrable door.

“I must leave London at once and return to the Lake Country,” he blurted out. “Will you come with me?”

“Why?”

“After our recent… adventures…” The word slithered off his tongue with hesitation, as if, after everything, witches and magic and demons remained in the realm of silly nonsense. “…and the departure of half our company… My role in all this has never been physical, and you are more than capable. But…”

“But you don’t want me to be alone. Moreover, you want a friend by your side, someone who understands what it is to no longer fit into the world in which we were born,” Vanessa said, reading through his not-entirely selfless concern.

He nodded. “Will you come?”

“Well, as you know, my calendar is quite overflowing with engagements. It will take some doing to extricate myself from all of them.”

One side of his mouth quirked in a gesture of a smile at her sarcasm. “There is a train at seven.”

“I can be packed in an hour.”

* * *

The country roads from the station were even bumpier than Vanessa remembered. It had been some years since she had last been in the Lake District—not since she had accompanied Sir Malcolm and Mina to a distant relative’s house for a summer house party. The region evoked happier times; even the trees seemed less menacing here. 

Victor’s long, clean fingers fidgeted and knotted themselves into impossible tangles, and his left knee shook. He was due for more of his morphine, Vanessa guessed, but the jolts and shaking of the carriage made injections impossible.

“Whom can I expect to meet?” she asked, breaking the companionable silence of an hour.

“My mother’s sister arrives tonight. A few aunts on my father’s side. Beyond that, there is no one. And everyone. Neighbors, servants. Too many to describe and none significant.” He paused. “No, that is not true. There is among the grounds men one who was always kind to me—and not simply because I was young Master Victor. And the housekeeper, Mrs. Donaldson. She always looked after me.” 

It was as though he had completely forgotten such formative figures’ existence until this moment, but with each stone they rolled over, a softness and a fear seeped into his features—an old iteration of Victor that Vanessa had never met.

“Did she give you second helpings of pie?” she asked, thinking of the housekeeper at the Murray house, who had also looked after her, even though she had been a lucky little girl with two effective sets of loving parents.

“She made an excellent steak and kidney.”

“My favorite was cherry, but to each his own.” Vanessa hesitated before coming to her next, more delicate, question. “And your cousin? Lily.”

“She will not be there. And she was never my cousin.”

“I confess, I never entirely believed that she was.”

For the first time in a while, he looked up at her instead of at a spot in the fabric of the interior. “You said nothing.”

“Far be it from me to impede upon your discretion. And you are nothing if not discreet, my dear doctor. Such secrets about you.” Vanessa leaned in closer to him, burrowing her head almost into his coat, drinking him in. “I have sensed them since first we met in the mortuary. I could smell them on you even amidst the odors of rotting flesh. Yours remind me of a sort of dusky flower.”

“We all have our secrets,” he said quietly. “And our sins. Some smell better than others.”

“I cannot speak for my sins. But most of my secrets have been laid bare within the intimacy of our company. Splayed like bits of Verbis Diablo on Sir Malcolm’s second-best desk.”

“Not all your secrets, I wager. Such as where you learned to keep that cottage I found you in.”

“No, not all. But enough. You have kept yours close to the heart, however. You have always been apart—visiting, never residing. Why did you keep to your garret? Sembene told me what it looked like. You needn’t have stayed. Sir Malcolm would have had you.”

“Large houses are not for me,” he replied. But at that moment, they turned a bend, and the estate came into view—by far the largest that Vanessa had ever visited.

They looked at one another with matching half-smiles at the irony.

“What will you do with it? Sell it?”

“Distant as I have always felt from my family, not even I want to be the one to destroy it. My mother would never have wished that.”

“You lost her when you were young,” Vanessa said. She didn’t know, of course, but there was always a tone in which people said these things that made it clear.

“The bloom, whose petals nipped before they blew, died on the promise of the fruit.” Victor frowned as soon as he had finished. “It’s all a lie, of course. There is no fruit. There never was.”

“And yet you keep such words in your memory and recite them at will.” This seemed as good a moment as any to broach a subject that lay heavy before them, if not yet consciously between them. Better to ease him into it through teasing, she told himself, largely for her own benefit and amusement. “They will think we are together.” She leaned in and whispered hotly into his ear, in order to see it turn pink, and hissed suggestively. _”Affianced.”_

He paled even further, if possible, while also turning red. A perfect peppermint. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

“You _have_ been in your laboratory for too long, doctor.”

“People have thought us worse. I will simply tell them the truth, and that will be the end of the matter.”

“And which truth is that? That I came to you in a mortuary and demanded you to perform an autopsy on a monster? Or that the reason we cannot possibly be engaged is because I am, in fact, promised to Satan himself?”

He clicked his teeth in impatience. “I will tell them that you are the ward of Sir Malcolm Murray, the great explorer, who hired me as a consultant in the case of his daughter’s illness. I will tell them that we became friends.”

“Men like you and women like me are rarely friends.”

“And yet here we are.”

“That is only because we have been transformed in ways that do not touch our faces. Outsiders cannot see it, and therefore will not believe it. The people we once were—the people the world wanted us to be—would only be here together, now, if… Any explanation other than the expected will simply lead them to assume that I am your whore. Which, given the gossip surrounding my… episodes… of recent years, will seem a likely answer. One from which I will not blanch, if you wish. I know who I am. I care not about any matron’s approval, but I do care if it inconveniences a friend during a difficult time.”

He sighed. “Very well. I will tell them that we are engaged.”

“And what will you tell them afterwards? You will either have to make an honest woman of me, doctor, or jilt me scandalously.” It should not have been a joke, but Vanessa had not had material for one in so long. She relished every word of this grim hilarity. Victor’s tortured, horrified, dismissive expressions only made it funnier. 

“A woman like you is much more likely to jilt me than the other way around.”

“A woman like me? What do you mean?” Vanessa asked, glad for the long shadows that shielded the laughter on her face.

“Pretty, I mean. Extremely pretty. And sophisticated. You are… have always been...” He blushed and stammered, and finally gave up. “Oh, come off it. You know what I mean.”

“I believe you mean this as a compliment, however irrelevant. But your suggestion is impossible. The daughter of a solicitor, throw away a chance at a baronetcy? Never!” She squeezed his arm. “No, darling, it is you who will have to break my heart and leave me bereft.”

He shook his head. “This is going to be even worse than I feared.”

* * *

Like every English gentleman of a certain class, Victor was immediately besieged by well-meaning but despotic aunts. He may have been the new master of the house, but he was still their little Victor, to be moulded and tutted. 

They sniffed at Vanessa, of course. Even while Victor stammered his way through his introduction, they looked her up and down, judged her introductory answers, and sniffed, with noses almost as crinkled as their black lace.

Vanessa kept her face sweetly placid, but inside she rolled. Sitting in a row as they were, interrogating her and clutching the furniture for support, they looked every bit the way she had imagined witches looking in her youth. But experience with the reality had taught her that the expectation was harmless compared with the reality. With herself, even.

It would not do to tell them this, however.

“And why has the engagement not been announced formally?” one asked. 

“It seemed disrespectful so soon after this tragedy,” Vanessa replied.

Another sniff. 

“Put her in the left turret bedroom,” another aunt said. “That will do for her.”

“It will need to be cleaned and aired,” the next in the row opined. “That wing has been shut for years, ever since, after…” She looked significantly at Victor and lowered her voice, intimating that she meant ‘since the death of Mrs. Frankenstein’. 

“ _Everything_ will need to be cleaned,” yet another aunt said.

“I don’t mind a little dust.”

A chorus of sniffs made it clear that yet again, she had answered poorly. Vanessa was just as out of practice as Victor.

* * *

While Victor was called away on ‘family business’ that the aunts made it clear was not, nor would ever be, any of her business, Vanessa decided to explore. She found her way to a wing that had lain empty for years. There was white cloth draped over the furniture, and an impressive amount of dust on all the surfaces. She imagined this was how the house at Granage Place would probably look in a few years if Sir Malcolm never returned. 

She opened a window and lit a cigarette. It was comforting, sitting here, surrounded by curlicues of smoke that wrapped around other people’s ghosts.

She explored further while she puffed, inhaling and blowing gently out, like pulling a trigger. She wandered into a wing that had last been occupied by a child. Yellowed drawings hid in a neat pile underneath stacks of academic books. Toys that had been haphazardly tossed into an ornate box peeped out from under their cobwebs. On the dark bookshelves, scientific tomes so thick they could brain a horse fought for pride of place with thin volumes of poetry. Vanessa ran her fingers through the layers of fine dust along the spines, enjoying the way she uncovered hidden titles and authors. 

Later, Victor found her, sitting at the desk, reading Byron.

“I’ve been looking for you,” he said.

“Not for long, I hope.”

“No. I deduced fairly quickly where you might flee. The darkest corridor.”

“This was your room, wasn’t it?”

“How did you guess?” he asked, but the question dripped with irony. “Mine only in name. My rooms at school were my real home. I was never at home here, after.”

Vanessa noticed that he used the same evasion as his aunts. 

“What remains here is simply the detritus that I did not think worth bringing,” he continued. “Books I had already mastered. Poetry I had already memorized.”

Vanessa held up the stack of charming drawings. “And art you no longer cared to pursue, despite promising talent.” 

“I enjoyed such trash as a child, but I quickly learned that art is a mere mirror of what truly matters. A veneer. Utterly false.”

“But science?”

“Science is truth.”

“And poetry?”

“You don’t need me to tell you about poetry. You know it as well as I do.”

“How go the arrangements?” she asked after a long silence, during which he sat facing her on the white draped ottoman that accompanied her white draped armchair.

“The funeral will be held tomorrow,” he said.

“And then?” Yet again, she reached out her hand, but this time, she waited for him to take it, for him to give her a caress. 

This time, he did.

“And then,” he said, “we will begin.”

“Begin what?”

“Do you think I brought you here merely to talk around my aunts? To play pretend with my family? To hold my hand through a funeral for men I no longer knew?”

“You gave me no other reason. But, no, it stood to reason there was purpose beyond such games.”

“The next stage of my research required me to quit London. It was for my safety, even more than yours. And you… The night we meant, it was _you_ who struck me. Not the great explorer nor the American cowboy. I asked for a scalpel and you were the one to put it into my hand. Something tells me I could have asked for even the most obscure tool, and you would have put it into my hand without a word or a question. You have a grasp of the concepts I need in an assistant.”

“In a partner,” she challenged. “I am no man’s assistant.”

“Very well,” he said, but his arrogance choked on the words. 

“What is this work you mean to pursue here, in the country? What is this danger posed to you?”

He gulped, and Vanessa leaned forward to catch his expression in the waning light. It did not match the usual confidence of his words and manner. It filled Vanessa with the portent of something awful. Something that had lain in front of her the entire time, but which, in London, focused as everyone had always been on her troubles, she had never sensed. 

“Victor,” she asked slowly. “What have you done?”

“It’s a long story.”

“But one which I have a suspicion I am qualified to believe.”

“More than most.”

Vanessa lit another cigarette and let the tale wash over her, without judgement and without horror. It seemed inevitable, really, once she’d been apprised of all the details. Victor, always the one on the outside, the visitor, proved today to be the one connecting all the outlying pieces. 

The day after tomorrow, she thought to herself as he spoke, they would have a lot of work to begin, aunts allowing.


End file.
